Matchmaking for wars in Clash of Clans is a very important item, because when the matchmaking is too lopsided, you are basically locked in a terrible situation for the entire war, and since clan wars are the primary source of fun in the game for many (including most in our clan), that can really sap the fun out of the game. Supercell is constantly tweaking how matchmaking works, but unfortunately right now its still an issue (we recently had a war where we faced an engineered clan that had enough TH11 attacks to cover all our TH11, TH10, and TH9 bases), so here is a post suggesting how to improve it.

The first and biggest change would be to have a cap on war weight for offense that is easily reached. Right now every upgrade you do offensively adds to your war weight, which not only doesn’t really make sense (in an attack you usually bring 3-4 different troops and spells, not the dozen available in the game), but also actively punishes people who ‘finish’ a TH level before moving up.

Here is how the cap would work: The first four upgrades would add weight, and after that a base would be ‘maxed’ for offensive war weight for that town hall level. The exception to this would be the royals; each level of a royal would continue to add weight. The weight of each upgrade would be tied to the TH tier, so upgrading say your dragons to TH8 levels would be significantly less weight than upgrading dragons to TH11 rank. The system would always take your highest four upgrades, which would include spells. Also, the first upgrade would weight more than the fourth, so even a base that only upgrades dragons and lighting (a viable attack when hitting down) would still have a fairly high war weight offensively.

The main benefit here is not punishing players for expanding their war attack options to all troops/spells. Right now its effective to limit yourself to only dragons, but its not fun for most players. A game shouldn’t be a decision between doing something fun and being effective, especially in a group setting where your decision to have fun then negatively impacts your clan mates.

Also while having access to more troops is a form of power, its not as crushing as an engineered base hitting a full tier below them, because a good base will be designed to defend against all attacks, and the game is currently balanced for this. It’s not balanced to allow you to do anything as a TH8 to defend against a max TH9; that is always a faceroll smash, and it’s not fun for anyone (unless your definition of fun is faceroll winning over and over again, but F those people).

Defensively every upgrade, including walls, should continue to add weight, as those upgrades actually do matter in terms of the overall difficulty of beating a base.

Additionally, total clan war weight should be mostly based off the top five bases, with the remaining bases adding to the weight, but not nearly as much as the top five. This stops the common practice of a clan having a few fully maxed bases at the very top, which are difficult to three star, and then stacking the rest of the clan with highly engineered bases with minimal defenses to lower their total war weight. This results in them facing maybe one maxed base at the top, and at worst they win by three-starring everything but that one base, and the other clan likely won’t three-star their top maxed bases. The rest of the bases almost don’t matter because they get rolled by overpowered offense, which is incredibly boring for both sides.

I don’t want to get into the finer details of which troop or defense should weight what, as this is mostly a focus on the overall approach to war weight, which right now I feel is too easy to manipulate. We run into engineered clans fairly often, and while we can sometimes beat them, it’s still not fun for many of our guys to hit defenseless bases, and to have most of the enemy bases three-starred after one attack. Wars should not be limited to the attack skill of just the top players in a clan to decide wars.

5 Responses to CoC: War weight formula suggestion

How much do you think the balance between offence/defence should weigh?

I thought it could be managed with an AND OR condition, so for instance you get 1000 weight for either Crossbow OR Valks level 3 (i.e. either an offence or a defence), but still had 1000 for both combined (or maybe only a small increase for the second e.g. 1200 combined). The idea would be to get people to an easy to hit floor when they go up a town hall level that would still make them weigh a magnitude higher than the previous TH level whilst still giving them a little wriggle room to experiment.

I do enjoy the .5 aspect of the game, and I don’t think there is anything wrong with being able to game the system to your advantage, the level you are able to do it is what needs restricting imo.

We’ve been saying the same things for years though so I am past thinking this is something that will ever be fixed, I think the whales are just too big a market for them to get rid of.

One thing I think SuperCell’s matchmaker uses is a light ELO system in the background, hence why we end up being matched against those clans a lot. Let’s face it, we usually match them and sometimes beat them as they are using engineering to compensate for lack of skill. I’m less concerned with clans that have th11s at number 18, as you know they will probably be used to hit a th9 anyhow. The real problem I see is the top 4 or 5, if there is for example 3 maxed th11s and we only have 1 then the war is already decided if we are equal skill.

Engineered bases aren’t fun at all even for the guy with the base. My short attempt at it didn’t last very long out of boredom. To me the concept is contra the spirit of the game. It seems like it wouldn’t be that hard for them to have the war calculator do a check on offense vs defensive weight. If a base’s offence/defense ratio reaches a certain threshold out of tolerance then they get counted as at least a max base of their town hall level minus one.